The Language Death Panel Is Now In Session

"YOU! Roll on the floor, laugh your ass off!"

With only 54 days left in the year, it was time to begin one of the many end-of-year chores that are fast approaching. You know, chores like putting up the Christmas lighting on the house, being allegedly blown away by fall colors, breaking my back splitting wood for the shop stove. All glorious endeavors, yes.

But it’s also a time of lists. For my children, it’s time to rev up their annual Santa Claus demands, which are beginning to look more and more like extortion schemes than anything else. The Wife compiles her list of my shortcomings and failures, balancing them against the various tax benefits she gets from being married to me. And me? I like to aggregate random lists of recently acquired mortal enemies, plots against me gone awry, ways in which the world has somehow screwed me over and things for which to be grudgingly thankful. I usually keep these lists on my person so that I can reference them from time to time, especially should I run into someone on the street who I suspect may have wronged me at some point.

Today I give you a short list of words and phrases I’d like to see purged from societal usage in 2011.

1.) LOL/ROFL/ROFLMAO. Especially as they come to be used as commentary on Facebook, these terms are false, misleading and used as nothing more than filler when you have nothing to say, yet feel the need to say something. I have yet to see a person “rolling on the floor, laughing (my) ass off”. If a statement on social media makes you do that, there’s a good chance you’ll be fired, if not carted off to a psychiatric ward. So no, I somehow doubt reading that so-and-so fell asleep during Mass is causing you to roll on the floor, and no, that’s not exactly priceless.

2.) “ROCKS MY FACE OFF”. Look, there are few things in this life that can truly qualify as having the ability to rock ones face off. Seeing Led Zeppelin live, landing on an aircraft carrier, causing an explosion while making a groundbreaking discovery in a scientific laboratory, surviving a big wave drop off the Cortes Bank – all events that qualify as face-rocking episodes. Bench pressing 95lbs., running 3 miles or 6 shots of Jagermeister on a Friday night hardly denote activities that would rock my face off. Fun, maybe. But let’s keep it in perspective, fools.

3.) Unfriend. It is my hope that we replace the this non-existent verb with the term “enemy”, as in “yeah, I couldn’t take any more of his rants about the wisdom of the Tea Party, so I enemied him.”

4.) Green. Specifically, as it pertains to your environmental impact. Overused by everyone, it only signifies to me that you’d rather be driving a Prius and you have latent guilt over glaciers you normally wouldn’t think twice about. I get it, I get it…..that Excursion now seems a little ridiculous, but you bought the thing so own it, already. Running some sort of “green flex-fuel hybrid” stickers on it is not going to take away the fact that you look like a tool in that thing to haul around your one kid.

5.) <3. This symbol is supposed to create/emulate a heart when sent as a text or posted as a message. Just say you love that person, or worse that you “heart” them already, because to me? It looks like you’re tossing a set of testicles their way, and that’s just gross.